


This City That We Love

by epistolic



Category: Hannibal (TV), Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-17
Updated: 2013-06-17
Packaged: 2017-12-15 06:40:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/846485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only rules Freddie Lounds likes to follow are her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This City That We Love

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Red Dragon! Or, at least, you might not understand the ending of this if you're not at least cursorily familiar with the fate of Freddie Lounds in Red Dragon. Also just a disclaimer that I haven't watched Episode 12 yet - this was based solely on Freddie Lounds being a BAMF in Episode 11! I apologise if there are any inconsistencies with 12! ♥

When Freddie Lounds first walks into Dr Carruther’s room and sees Abel Gideon standing over a mangled body, there is a moment – a split and finite second, like a window left open – when she could’ve turned and run. 

She doesn’t.

\--

“The problem with your style of journalism,” Will Graham says, “is that it’s obnoxious.”

This is true. Freddie smiles at him. She is wearing one of her more garish suits – teal lined with black. Her perfume, purposefully strong, precedes her. This is the thing about Freddie Lounds: once you meet her, you never quite forget her, whether she slips you one of her gold-lined business cards or not.

It is relatively easy to forget Will Graham. If he doesn’t speak, he melts right into the shadows. Your eye skims over him. He isn’t there.

There are advantages to being unseen, but Freddie Lounds couldn’t name you a single one.

\--

Wendy Villers is a stripper at a grimy little hovel called Wonderland. On Fridays, the place is always packed. Smoke rises in a bluish smog. The air is punctuated every now and then by the sharp crack of breaking glass; sometimes, also, there is the crack of breaking bones.

“Freddie,” Wendy says, and smiles a low smile.

When Freddie first stepped into this joint maybe a month ago, men looked at her. Their eyes hovered on the hem of her skirt. They dragged hungrily up the taut muscle of her thighs; lingered on the swell of her breasts beneath her suit. Now, they wait until her back is turned before they try this. Now they know better.

Freddie leans across the counter. “Hello, Wendy. Busy night?”

“Never too busy for you, and you know it.”

Nobody knows where Wendy comes from. Freddie, because it’s in her blood, had snooped around, but even she’d come up empty. Wendy Villers is an unknown entity, like a punch in the face that you never see coming.

Freddie can identify with that.

“Got a fair share of petty crime stories tonight,” Wendy says. “If you want them.”

“Got anything bigger?”

Wendy hikes a brow, the corner of her dark red mouth hooking up. “Getting too grand for us now, are we, Miss Frederica Lounds? The odd break-and-enter not good enough for you anymore, hmm?”

Freddie smiles back. A white flash of teeth. They do this every night.

“Oh, Wendy, you know me,” she says. “I always want more.”

\--

“If you feel like you’re going to faint,” Abel Gideon tells her amiably, “feel free to sit down on that stool over there. But I’d really prefer you didn’t. It would be nice for Dr Chilton to keep on breathing.”

“Thank-you kindly for the offer,” Freddie says, “but I’m alright.”

And she is. It is a new experience, to stand at the head of an operating table. Abel Gideon’s hand is iron-sure, steady, and she watches the blood bloom across Chilton’s splitting belly with morbid interest: all the little pieces that keep a human being together.

“Are you going to kill me too?” she asks after a moment.

Gideon doesn’t even look at her. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not scared of me,” Gideon says.

\--

Wendy looks up, midway through wiping off her make-up. “Freddie.”

She knows what Wendy is going to say. They are good at pretending they don’t give a fuck about each other most of the time, it’s what keeps them going, but every now and then they slip up.

“I’m fine,” Freddie says. It’s true. She sits on the end of Wendy’s bed.

“You could’ve been shot, for fuck’s sake,” Wendy says. “I don’t know what planet you come from, Freddie, but on mine that certainly doesn’t constitute _fine_.”

“He wasn’t shooting at me. He just wanted to ask me for an address.”

“What if he’d missed?”

Freddie shrugs, picks at a bloodstain on her collar. “He didn’t.”

Wendy stares at her. In the dim, crappy light of the single bare bulb on the ceiling, the sharp lines of Wendy’s face are almost harsh. There is such a shrill contrast between skin and shadow. The clarity of it takes Freddie by surprise: the stab of feeling, the sudden and unexpected recognition of beauty. 

“You’re awfully calm for someone who just saw a man die in front of her,” Wendy says at last.

“People die all the time,” Freddie says.

There is another bloodstain on her sleeve. She doesn’t remember getting it – can only remember the gallop of her heart in her ears, the thrill of blood in her body, the copper-bright realisation that she was alive.

She’d started small. Local muggings, the occasional bar fight, pick-pockets. She’d personally shoved her voice recorder into the faces of dope peddlers, suspected rapists, paedophiles released on good behaviour, vandals, arsonists. She’d felt the itch all journalists feel: that push for something more sensational. Something just a bit more bloody. She’d moved on to murderers. Serial killers. She began to tiptoe over the boundaries of traditional journalism, because traditional was boring. She started visiting crime scenes herself; she started breaking the law, because the only rules Freddie Lounds liked to follow were her own.

\--

Abigail Hobbs sits with her small hands folded in her lap. “You’ll help me?”

“Of course I will,” Freddie says.

With Abigail she is as gentle as a mother. There is something about this girl – something quietly monstrous that Freddie can sense from a mile away. Perhaps this is the one true gift of Freddie Lounds: the ability to scent out the messy things, the dark things, that people would rather keep buried forever.

“I’ll help you tell your version of the story.” She places a gloved hand on Abigail’s own; gloved, because Freddie prefers always not to leave prints. “I’ll give you a voice. A chance to clear your name for good.”

“You’d do that?”

“Why else would I be here, Abigail? I want to help you.”

There are cleaner ways to kill someone than with a knife or with a bullet. There is an elegance to murder by words: every one with a different heft and timbre, a million individual weapons that destroy without leaving a mark. You can slit a man’s throat with a simple sentence. You can gut him, and not even have to rinse your hands.

Abigail smiles at her. Oblivious. 

“Alright, I’ll tell you,” Abigail Hobbs says.

\--

Nobody admits it, but the truth is always ugly.

Of course, you can package it up differently. You can say, Will Graham is not insane; Will Graham is not a murderer; Will Graham is the kind of person you want, on his hands and knees, peering at a row of decomposing bodies at a crime scene. 

Freddie isn’t stupid: even her enemies are well aware of this. Freddie Lounds is clever enough to see a shitstorm for what it is.

It’s not her fault she just happens to enjoy them, too.

\--

“I was thinking,” Wendy Villers says. “There’s nothing keeping us here.”

Freddie checks her voice recorder one more time, weighs the batteries in her hand. “Sure there is.”

“What?”

“Your job. My job.” She clicks the battery compartment closed. “One of these days I’ll have to find a smaller one of these. It’s like lugging around a brick.”

“Freddie, you’re not listening to me.”

Wendy is in one of her moods again. Whenever this happens, a bright anger clouds her face; energy comes off her like lightning strikes, snapping in the dark. 

“We’ve got money,” Wendy says. She jerks the zipper of her leather boot, trying to get it shut, but too angry to try it properly. “We’ve got enough savings to relocate to somewhere better. Someplace where I don’t have to take my clothes off every night. Someplace where you don’t have to go getting yourself kidnapped by a serial killer and made to watch somebody’s _intestines_ getting ripped out of – ”

Freddie laughs. “Wendy, you can quit your job if you want. But this is what I’m good at.”

“You were good at writing before this, too,” Wendy says. “When you covered mainstream news. Not every sensationalist – whatever the fuck this is.”

“I can’t go back to that. You know I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t stand it,” Freddie says.

Wendy sits down, heavily, on the edge of her make-up table. “Freddie.”

“You don’t need to worry, alright? I take care of myself. I’ve got the smarts. I’ve got the experience. It was you who told me that, remember?” She reaches for her jacket. “And I’ve always been very lucky.” 

“Where are you going?”

“FBI. Got a call about a story.”

“Freddie, I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Wendy says. 

“You’ve always got a bad feeling,” Freddie says. She leans in; Wendy smells like soap, beer, cheap lipstick. She tastes like cotton candy. The first time they kissed, Freddie was as drunk as drunk could get – but there’s no fixing that now. “I’ll be back before you even notice I’m gone.”

“I doubt it,” Wendy says.

\--

Freddie sits, crosses her legs at the knee, looks up and smiles.

“I can give you an interview about the Tooth Fairy,” Will Graham says.

**Author's Note:**

> I might've tweaked a few things in Red Dragon - I wish I could say it was for artistic purposes, but actually I couldn't remember Wendy's last name, or where she worked. Sorry /o\ I hope this was enjoyable nonetheless! ♥
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [Tumblr](http://epistolica.tumblr.com), [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com), or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


End file.
